“We can’t listen to the radio?” he asked.
“The reverend collected them all when we came into camp. Cellphones, too, though none of those were working. He said that the noise would upset the children, and it was better if he just told us what was happening.”
Nick looked at Tex cautiously. “What do you think about that?” he said. Tex chewed thoughtfully. “What I got, see,” he said, “is a farm that got destroyed three nights ago, and a momma who just lost her husband, and four kids who just lost their grand-daddy. And if the man who feeds my family don’t want me to listen to the radio, then I guess I don’t listen to it, and I don’t think much about it, neither.”
Nick nodded. “I understand,” he said.
“Besides,” Tex said, and shrugged his big shoulders, “where is there to go? The roads and bridges are gone. We got poisoned water and floods north and east. South and west we got the piney woods—pines was so close together you could barely get between ’em anyway, and now the quake knocked ’em all down, so it’s nothin’ but a big tangle that people can’t get through. I can’t get through it with my family, that’s for sure.”
Nick nodded. The quake had knocked the middle part of the country back two hundred years. With transportation and communications gone, each little community might as well be an island all to itself.
“Do you know,” Nick asked, “if the reverend, or anyone else, is trying to communicate with the outside?” Tex just shook his head.
“Hey.” Martin walked around the truck. There was a grin on his face, but a wary determination in his eyes. “Y’all don’t need to talk about this.”
Be cautious, Nick’s inner voice said. “Well,” he answered, “I’m new here. I’m just trying to work out the rules.”
“That’s good.” Martin nodded. “But if you need to know things, you should ask the guides. That’s what we’re here for, to guide you.” He hitched up his belt, and Nick remembered the holstered pistol he wore behind his back.
“I wanted to know if we can call our families outside Rails Bluff,” Nick said.
“No communications,” Martin said. “There’s no way.”
“There’s a radio station,” said a new voice. “If the Reverend Doctor Brother His Holiness Frankland could just be persuaded to use his radio station to call for help, we could have food and fuel and medicine brought in.”
Nick looked at the new man. He was a red-faced, balding man with a large stomach and a loud voice.
“We got all that now, Brother Olson,” Martin said. “People were worried about things like insulin, but it turned out that Reverend Frankland had a whole refrigerator of the stuff. Every time food supplies start to run short, he opens another bunker, and there’s the food. The reverend’s been preparing for this for years.”
“So why are we digging in the ruins for beat-up old cans, if we have so much?” Olson asked. “And why can’t we just send a message, on Brother His Holiness Frankland’s radio station, to let our families outside the area know that we’re okay? I’ve got a sister in Mississippi that must be worried sick about me and my whole family.”
Martin shook his head. “Take that up with Brother Frankland. But if I were you, I’d just give thanks to the Lord that you’re with us, where it’s safe.” He looked at his watch, clapped his hands together. “You guys better finish. We need to start workin’.”
Olson kicked a chunk of brick fifty feet, then stalked away. Nick washed the last of his sandwiches down with water and began clearing rubble. The truck that had brought their lunch left with three bodies in its bed.
A couple hours after lunch Martin blew his whistle. He’d got a call on his walkie-talkie: there was a situation near the camp.
Someone had died. There was an emergency. And now everyone had to catch fish. Trouble began at mid-morning, when the fence-builders began to assemble the fence that would cut off the people in the camp from their vehicles. Several clumps of refugees surged forward, shouting and gesticulating. The deputies waved them back. And then people among the crowds began to throw things, first whatever they had handy, and then fist-sized whitewashed rocks that were used to line the campsite’s fire circles. The fence-builders retreated. The deputies looked nervous and clutched their weapons as they dodged the rocks being flung at them.
At the first sign of trouble Omar had made his way to Ozie Welks, who stood in the parking lot. Since the destruction of his bar he had been working full-time as a special deputy.
“I need you to shoot me a rioter,” Omar said.
Ozie shifted his plug tobacco from his right cheek to his left. “You got it, Omar.” He raised his .30-’06, sighted briefly over the iron sights, and squeezed the trigger.
Omar saw the bullet hit, strike right in the chest of a young black man with a stone in an upraised arm. There was a splash of dust and blood and the stone-thrower fell.
There were shouts. Screams and curses. A thrashing of tents and awnings as people fled. Though a few people unloaded a stone before they ran, Omar heard most of the rocks thud on the ground as the crowd rolled back.
And then there were more shots, bang-bang-bang, as a man in dreadlocks—a huge black man, tall and broad-shouldered and amazingly fat—came running from the crowd, firing a pistol as he ran. His cheeks and stomach and dreads bounced with each step. Deputies dived for cover as bullets sang in the air around them.
“Him, too,” said Omar.
Ozie sighted, fired. The bullet hit the fat man in the hip and dropped him to the ground, but the man still thrust out his pistol, still fired until the slide locked back on an empty magazine; and then Ozie shot again and hit again in the center of the man’s naked chest, and the man kicked twice and died.
“Semper fi,” said Ozie.
None of the deputies had been hit, despite the man who had managed to fire off a full magazine. Shooting a handgun while running full-tilt toward an armed enemy was a terrifying sight, but not the most tactical thing the gunman could have done.
A shriek came from somewhere in the camp, the sound of a woman in terror. The sound raised the hackles on Omar’s neck. “What the hell?” he muttered.
He moved forward, across the line of the uncompleted fence, gestured his deputies forward. “Get that gun!” he said, pointing to the dreadlocked man. The crowd shrank from the advancing, armed line, receding like an ocean wave to reveal a young woman sprawled across a three-year-old child. The child was wailing, too, her face so contorted by pain and fear that the tears almost leaped from her eyes. There was blood on the child and on the mother. One of Ozie’s bullets had gone through the target and struck the little girl.
In the arm, Omar thought. The wound couldn’t be that critical if the child had so much strength to scream.
“My baby!” the woman wailed. “My baby! Oh Jesus help my baby!” Omar stopped dead as he stood over them. Give her a box of candy, he thought inanely. Yes. Yes, that made sense.
“My baby! My baby! They shot my baby!”
He bent, encircled the mother’s shoulders with his arms. “We’ll get your girl to the doctor,” he said.
“Come along, now.”
He rushed her out of the camp. Beckoned to Merle. “Take the girl to Dr. Patel,” he said, then added, in a low voice, “Don’t let the mother talk to anyone else.”
“You got it, boss.”
“Bring them back when the doctor’s finished.”
When Merle had raced off, siren crying and lights flashing, Omar called Jedthus.
“I want you to go to town,” he said, “and bring me a bag of candy. Here’s five bucks.” Jedthus looked thunderstruck. “Omar? A bag of candy?”